Five Ideas "Five Nights at Freddy's" Can Use to Make it a Good Movie

I am a huge anime and video game fanatic that also loves going to the movies. I am also an aspiring film director and writer.

1. Isolate the main character.

One of the many things that defines Five Nights at Freddy's Video Games to Film is that you're confined in a tiny office of some sort with only very few ways to defend yourself: The doors and the lights. The movie can greatly implement this in a way that unsettles the audience without the need of gore or shock value.

Maybe when things are going down, he actually tries to shut both doors and call someone that may help, but the phone's battery dies on the first night. Then, when the power goes out near 6 A.M., he only survives when the restaurant opens, and the animatronics return to their normal positions. But the thought alone that he was going to die causes him to have hallucinations, stay awake, or hear noises when no one's there.

2. Limit the jump scares to being seen on the security cameras.

One excessively used thing in horror movies is the jump scare. It was effective when it was first used, now, it's become a dodge for much more imaginative scares. While the games contain many jump scares, the atmosphere is already nailed, so the jump scares are justified and are, as such, scary.

A good idea for this would be to only show the jump scares on the security cameras, with the grained and static-y wiring making the noise of the jump scares muffled, but still scary, and instead of lunging for the camera first, they stare at it with their eyes black. Here's an example.

A good old-fashioned jump scare

You see how chilling that looked? That's because the creator of the games, Scott Cawthon, nailed the atmosphere, so the automatic response to this would be unsettling. If they could use this idea in the film, it would look legitimately frightening on the big screen.

3. Tell the backstory through video cassettes.

In the games, a certain employee leaves you phone messages at the beginning of every night, explaining the backstory of the restaurant and leaving tips of what to do if the events in which the animatronics make a bee-line for your office.

I'm not saying "Remove the Phone Guy from the movie!", I'm saying to also use video cassettes to show the main character and the audience what happened during a particular event known to fans as "The Bite of '87". You can show it through the viewpoint of a security camera, or show it through the eyes of someone filming it. That way, the audience gets respectably terrified of the graphicness of the "Bite".

4. Show and tell.

As mentioned above, you can use the "cassette" example to show AND tell the audience what happened to the restaurant. You have the Phone Guy (the teller) and the cassettes (the shower) leaving the main character in a sense of terror and fear, making him remember the imagery of everything shown and told to him.

5. Leave the ending to interpretation.

The ending in a horror film is supposed to get people to think long and hardly about the events that happened to the main character, so, why not have something drastic happen to either the restaurant or the main character.

You could either...

Have his/her boss meet them in the boss' office so that the main character could explain everything to him/her.

Implement "Night 6" into the mix by either killing them or ending the film when the monitor comes up.

Shut the power off and end it as Freddy finishes his song.

These are perfect ways to leave your audience guessing what's going to happen to our main hero, and whether or not he/she will live.

So, folks, there you have it! My ideas that, hopefully, the producers of this film will listen to and use in the upcoming FNAF movie.

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